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This story was published on July 26, 2013 during a general strike in Quebec’s construction industry. In it, Montreal Gazette reporter Christopher Curtis shared some of his experiences as a unionized worker.

One of the guys on our crew was a former karate champion. He wore oversized dentures, had spiked grey hair and was obsessed with the band the Scorpions.

From the archives: The construction life — sweat, danger and limited optionsBack to video

Another guy once sold cocaine for the Hells Angels. He’d also worked as a jockey and a horse trainer before ending up in construction. Sometimes he referred to his right hand as “the paw” because it was missing a couple of fingers. I never thought to ask how his hand became “the paw.”

I attended high school with one of my other fellow construction grunts. He was a star athlete: a football player with a God-given talent for smashing people. He was clever and hard-working but struggled to keep away from cocaine, liquor and slot machines.

There was also James, a former Mohawk Warrior who claimed to have been on the front lines during the Oka Crisis in 1990. He might or might not have spent time in federal prison.

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In the seven years before I became an intern at The Gazette, these were the men I shared my summers with.

Unless it was raining, chances are you’d find us mopping some out-of-the-way highway with gallon after gallon of piping hot tar. A good week would have us sweating out 12-to 14-hour shifts for as many as seven days in a row.

It wasn’t rocket science; we sealed cracked asphalt with tar. Pretty much the only prerequisite for the job was that you had to be willing to do it. There was some skill and a surprising amount of finesse involved, but what it really came down to was that these guys were dog tough.

For a university student, it was the ideal summer job: sunshine, exercise, $20 an hour and a growing collection of profoundly eccentric work pals. By the time the fall semester came around, I’d be back in some classroom brushing the job off as a character-building exercise. Of course, while I got to head back to a life of air conditioning and thirsty Thursdays, the dozens of men I worked with stayed on the road.

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This wasn’t a temporary gig for them, not something that would make for a series of anecdotes at faculty dinner parties. No, this was their life.

And if we’re being honest, it’s probably about as good a professional life as many of these guys could ever hope for.

To be fair, the job could be a source of great levity. There was the company golf tournament, which saw hordes of bearded monsters rip through 18 holes, drinking untold gallons of beer in the sun. One worker, a former caddy, won $300 for landing his shot closest to the flag. Within hours that money had been blown on beer and cocaine.

The Christmas party was another yearly highlight. I always got a kick out of seeing my mullet-wearing, ass-kicking colleagues in turtlenecks and oversized blazers in the lobby of some gaudy reception hall.

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The boldest among them treated the party’s open-bar policy as a kind of dare. One year a guy drank so much he passed out in a snowbank and wound up in the emergency room – where, legend has it, his blood-alcohol level was clocked at a superhuman 0.56 per cent (seven times the legal limit and probably enough to kill most non-aquatic mammals). Needless to say, the open-bar policy was subsequently revised.

But those were the highlights. The grind of the job wore guys down. Injuries were extremely common. They ranged from chronic knee and joint problems to terrible burns and maiming.

One of my buddies was particularly accident-prone. He fell hands-first into a 400-degree bucket of tar one day and needed extensive surgery to replace the skin he lost. Years later his hands still bore terrible scars and his drinking, which had already been infamous, became problematic. He started taking a cab directly from the bar to the job site, where he would sleep in one of our trucks so as not to be late for work. One day he didn’t show up to a site in Trois-Rivières. We never saw or heard from him again.

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Another injury, which predated my time with the company, caused a man to lose

one of his testicles. He was testing a pressure washer when it burst open and the water ripped into him with 3,000 pounds of force. The long recovery and bouts of depression became too much for him to handle. He hanged himself that year.

Drugs were also a problem. Frank, who was my closest friend at the company, started depending on amphetamines just to be able to function normally. He would stay up for days at a time, working 14-hour shifts and then driving around the North Shore collecting scrap metal from the side of the road.

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Most summers we would go for beers after work and he could spend the entire night entertaining my brother and me with card tricks. But that last year he pretty much just did speed and drove into the night looking for metal and selling pills. In the end, he lost his house and his wife left him. She took their daughter with her.

I remember seeing Frank shortly before he died. He barely looked like himself anymore. At his prime, he had been a 6-foot-4 beast with a hulking 270-pound frame. No one could out-hustle him. But he was also an infinitely generous man with a childlike obsession with Dragon Ball comic books. That day, at a traffic light in St-Eustache, he sat behind the wheel of a dented pickup truck and looked almost skeletal. We locked eyes for a moment, the light changed, and we went our separate ways.

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The amphetamines ate away at his immune system, and he died from heart failure about three years ago. He was 33.

Guys like Frank are the extreme examples. Generally speaking, the people I worked with were eccentric, but they also cared for their children and worked tirelessly to provide them with better lives than they themselves had been given. These weren’t the “five-guys-around-one-shovel” stereotype that people tend to foster about construction workers. They showed up to work hurt and hung over and poured their souls into the job. They weren’t stupid, or at least not any dumber than the average desk jockey. They liked working with their hands, hated authority and wanted a job where they could smoke as many Peter Jacksons as they liked. (I’m still disappointed every time I climb into a truck that doesn’t smell of cheap cigarettes.) I guess if there’s a lesson for the average person to take away here, it’s that you shouldn’t yell at construction workers when you’re stuck in traffic. They didn’t break the road, and besides, they’re people, not farm equipment.

The people who spend their summers fixing the province’s highways are constantly reminded that they’re disposable. If they get injured or show up late one too many times, there are an abundance of young, low-skilled labourers ready to jump in and snatch that job away. It’s the most basic and harshest reality of working in construction: If you don’t like the job, someone else will.

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